


The Art of Loneliness

by PetrichorPerfume



Series: The Art of the Fallen [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Fallen Angels, Insanity, Lucifer's Cage, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-02-12
Packaged: 2018-05-20 00:08:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5985705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PetrichorPerfume/pseuds/PetrichorPerfume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucifer looses his mind slowly, and by degrees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art of Loneliness

Lucifer is well-versed in the art of loneliness. It’s a very fine and delicate process, he thinks, taking a scepter, a hammer, a mace, to his aching soul and calling it _art._ It’s a very thin and fragile line that he must tread, one that straddles the borders between such things like love and hatred, beauty and gruesomeness, light and the pitch-black, boundless insanity that is slowly creeping in upon him, relentless and far more enduring that he will ever hope to be.

 

He fills the silence with mindless, aimless chatter. There are four pillars holding the instrument of his imprisonment – for he _refuses_ to call it a cage – together, and he names them, one, two, three, four, Michael, Lucifer, Raphael, and Gabriel. They are as close as can be, yet worlds – no, _universes_ – apart. He talks to them, sometimes, and tells them about the things he thinks about in the dark and the cold and the endless fields of ice. He sits at the Michael’s feet, sometimes, and he weeps, but he doesn’t let Lucifer – and what a prideful, beautiful thing it is, the pillar he named after the creature he used to be, and, oh, how he hates it – see. And sometimes he skips over to Raphael and makes flowers out of the dust that sometimes drifts down in slow, lazy circles from the settling of the world above them, and sets them at his brother’s feet just as he used to in Heaven, just so he can imagine the sweet smile that used to grace his little brother’s face. And sometimes he goes to Gabriel and tells him every joke he used to know and all the new ones he can think of until they’re so worn out he’s sure they’ll make the stone bleed if he tells them again.

 

It’s only a matter of time before they start talking back, Lucifer knows, because the growling, hungry darkness isn’t far now. _This is all part of the plan,_ Michael whispers to him, still stony and cold but more alive than he’d been in centuries, and Lucifer is so grateful he could cry. (He does cry, with ugly, ungraceful sobs like some pitiful beast, and Michael talks him through it - _this is good, you’re okay; I’m here now_ – but soon enough the other pillars start to talk, too, and he flies for the first time in ten thousand years because he feels so _light_ without the dark shroud of loneliness weighing him down.)

 

And part of him says that he should resist, that this is not art anymore, just insanity, but the rest of him rises up and sings in pure elation because it may have taken a million years – each one carved into that detestable block of stone in the south of his cage, coiling like a serpent – but the loneliness has finally, finally, _finally_ lifted, and the only thing he wants to say when Michael says ‘I love you’ is, “I love you more.”

 

(He knows it’s only a matter of time before he sees them, too, whole and present and in the flesh. He can’t wait.)

 


End file.
